Monday, November 7, 2016

Six films on Hoketus, Introduction by Bas Andriessen, the author:HOKETUS was an influential ensemble for contemporary music in Holland from
1976 -1986. On september 14th 1986 the group gave 2 farewell concerts (afternoon
& evening) because it's musicians decided it was enough. It had existed 10
years. In this period the group had commissioned several composers to write
pieces for them. And they had played all over the world. They were regarded
highly in the international new music scene. This year it is 30 years ago that
HOKETUS stopped and 40 years ago that they started. In 6 video films I reflect
on the history of the ensemble and it's way of working &
thinking.In the second half of the nineties
of last century I organized all kinds of programs about contemporary music in a
small theatre in my hometown Nijmegen in the Netherlands called O'42. Amongst
these programs were live interviews I did with Dutch composers combined with
performances of their music. At a certain moment my main guest was composer Huib Emmer. In our (phone-)conversations
about what to do that evening Huib and I agreed to invite The Piano duo (Gerard
Bouwhuis & Cees van Zeeland) to play some of his music. This meant that
there were 3 guests that all had been prominent members of HOKETUS, so I
thought: wouldn't it be nice for the audience if we could show them some images
of their former ensemble as part of my interview with Huib? So I went to work.

To keep a long story short: when I approached CNM (Center for Dutch Music) to ask if they knew if filmed
material of HOKETUS existed they -to my relief- not only were able to confirm
that it did but they even said that the farewell concert of the group in 1986
was filmed and that they had these video recordings at their disposal. Wow!
Well, would they be so kind to send me some of that? "No problem", was the
cooperative answer and within a week I received a mailed package in which to my
total surprise were 3 video-tapes (those were still the pre-internet and pre-dvd
days of video folks!) with so much (edited!) material on it that there was
reason to presume they had sent me the entire concert. Very
impressive!A little bit strange was that I was not told to
deliver it all back to CNM. And also in the aftermath of my Huib-interview there
came no CNM requests of this kind. So these unique images (the 3 musicans told
me they never had seen them) remained in my possession. And more strange: if this
were copied versions, why then was nothing ever done with the original material?
Why was it filmed & edited, but never shown to an audience? Why were these
tapes catching dust in some forgotten archive to remain
unseen?I decided in 2015 -when I realized we
were approaching the 30th anniversary of the ensemble's end and the 40th birthday
of it's start- I was going to do something myself. In the mean time I had
become a TV-program maker for local TV in Nijmegen so I had gained some of the necessary
knowledge. I had invested a little in the equipment how to do that technically.
And with regard to the content: it was territory I had become kind of
experienced in.I knew I was not going to
make a documentary. Since this is a no budget enterprise it was
obvious from the beginning that there was no money to travel long distances to
do archive work. film abroad, etc. The only thing that was within the realm of
the possible was to take my camera's and visit some of the musicians and
composers involved, interview them, and create a filmed oral
history. That would be one film. Then I would also make a video of every
composition I had the farewell concert version of by combining these images with
an interview with the composer of the piece + remarks by some members of the
ensemble.Of course it wasn't possible to
interview everybody involved. So I had to make choices who I was going to
interview and who I wasn't. Which criteria should I use in deciding which
ensemble members I was going to approach for an interview?Since
HOKETUS consisted out of identical instrument groups it immediately seemed
logical to me that I should interview one member of each instrument: percussion,
bass guitar, pan pipes, piano/keyboards, sax. That I decided to choose for Paul
Koek (perc), Gerard Bouwhuis (p/keyb), Huib Emmer (bass g), Patricio Wang (pan
p) & Peter van Bergen (sax) was because at a certain moment this were the 5
musicians that formed an important edition of the group LOOS.These films are dedicated to all the
musicians that once were members of HOKETUS and made it the internationally
influential Dutch ensemble it was.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Writing
music for unconventional ensembles and music theatre has been a constant in Louis
Andriessen’s career. Together with the American composers Philip Glass, Steve
Reich and John Adams, and his compatriot Michel van der Aa, he is one of the
foremost composers of postmodern contemporary opera (so-called ‘postopera’). The
four-part De Materie (1985-88) is representative of his bold and manifest
operatic activity. Both in terms of music and staging, the postopera Rosa,
the Death of a Composer(1993-94, staged by Peter Greenaway) stands
among Andriessen’s most transgressive and ‘juicy’ pieces. Reinventing the
culture of Western movies, exaggerating its macho elements to the edge of
political correctness, subordinating the role of the ‘diva’ who sings naked
most of the time, Rosa is still too hot to handle for many. In a different way,
the delicate Writing to Vermeer(1997-98,
again in collaboration with Greenaway) tenderly recomposes baroque music and
its wider culture. The film-operaLa Commedia (2004-08, directed by
Hal Hartley) is a complex multimedia event rethinking love, death, heaven and
hell, and looking afresh at romantic music through Andriessen’s very particular
lens. Having in mind his small-scale operas Inanna(2003) and Anaïs Nin(2009-10), as well as the early collaborative
opera Reconstructie (1969), Theatre of the World(2015)arrives as Andriessen’s eighth operatic offspring.

When we hear the opening solo bass trombone of Theatre of the World, our first
associationmight be with Luciano
Berio’s Sequenza V (1966).
Andriessen’s former teacher’s piece was a tribute to Grock, ‘the last of great
clowns’. It was his capacity to appear hilarious and deeply melancholic simultaneously
that made Grock’s performances so famous. This trombone-clown reference is in a
way a perfect match for this piece, subtitled ‘a grotesque in 9 scenes’, where
melancholy and irony are the main motors of the ‘drama’. The solo bass trombone
elaborating a descending glissando motive slowly involves another trombone part
and the two lines grow into a background structure supporting the singing of
the principal character, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. The legacy of
Padre Atanasio - ‘the last man who knew everything about the theatre of the
world’ - is also a play on the absurd: he is praised both as a great scientist
of his time and as a ridiculous charlatan.

Theatre of the
World is certainly not the first stage work in which Andriessen is
attracted to the grotesque. The fourth part of La Commedia - The Garden of
Earthly Delights - was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s eponymous
phantasmagorical oil on wood triptych, a colourful and amusing portrayal of
human nature and its fleshly appetites. The painting features a number of nudes
engaged in all kinds of sexual perversions and leisure activities, flying, and swimming
among fantastical ‘buildings’, giant fruit, birds, butterflies, seashells, fish,
etc. Likewise, the first part of La
Commedia refers to the anarchic behavior suggested in Bosch’s painting The Ship of Fools, which depicts a
bizarre company floating in a barge. As a metaphor for mankind, the barge drifts
away in an unpredictable direction. And in keeping with this passion for
distortion, we might easily locate the ‘horse drama’ Rosa, the Death of a Composer in the line-up. It is a Brechtian parody
about film, opera, and their interrelationship. It mockingly depicts the world
of western movies and an alleged conspiracy against composers. The Uruguayan composer
Huan Manuel de Rosa is a macho violent guy who appears to care more about his
horse than his mistress Esmeralda. Yet despite his cruelty, Esmeralda does
everything to please her lover. She even paints her body black to appear more
like Rosa’s mare... Finally, the depiction of a character from De Materie comes to mind as another
example of grotesquerie, with the painter Piet Mondrian evoked as a ‘dancing
Madonna’ in Part 3, De Stijl.

In Scene 4 of Theatre
of the World Athanasius Kircher, the boy and Pope Innocent XI are on a
journey on the river Lethe,the river of
forgetfulness that flows through the Underworld. Suddenly they realize that
they have arrived at Babylon. The tower of Babylon is the one depicted by
Pieter Bruegel, in another painting laden with symbolism and critical of the
actions of humanity. The fact that the libretto is written in seven languages
(Italian, French, English, Dutch, Middle Dutch, Spanish and Latin) probably
refers both to the Tower of Babel myth, and to the fact that Kircher himself
spoke several languages. The motive of the ship sailing on the river that makes
one to forget is again a potent invocation of human nature in its more
superficial, grotesque aspects. The tender and ecstatic aria of Sor Juana
speaks of pyramids, of Pharaoh, and of associated glories. Its music reminds us
both of Andriessen’s song ‘Y Después’ (1983), which uses Lorca’s text in
Spanish, and of the ‘Earthly Delights’ of La Commedia. It is profoundly
melancholic and ecstatic at one and the same time.

The singing characters in Theatre of the World are primarily male. Padre Atanasio is most of
the time followed by the boy who turns out to be a devil in disguise. The boy,
sung by a soprano, could also be seen as Athanasisus’s alter-ego, and
Athanasius is often annoyed by the questions he asks.Likewise, the character of Pope Innocenzo XI
is portrayed as particularly grotesque and conservative. His stiffness is
underlined. A minor role is given to the hangman of Rome, too. And there are
also three witches, a reference to the witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: on
the evil side and with the power of prediction. The young lovers, He and She,
are likewise a reference to Romeo and Juliet. And hovering above all those
characters there is the celestial presence of Sor Juana, a Mexican nun and
poetess who was allegedly the platonic love of Athanasius Kircher.Hers is the most tender and most passionate
music in this piece. In the context of Andriessen’s other operas, the character
of Sor Juana might be located somewhere between Hadewijh (De Materie) and Beatrice (La
Commedia).

The characterization of women in Andriessen’s operas
is profound, and, I dare to say, more searching then the characterization of
men. Even when an opera is named after a man, the most impressive roles may
well be sung by women. The most obvious example of this is Writing to Vermeer, where the title character never appears, but is nonetheless
the one who holds the power to objectify the women. They are the objects of his
art, and he is the subject who regulates their existence in painting, but also
in ‘real’ life. Beatrice was a female ideal for Dante (‘he was sure that she
was sent from heaven’), singing with a celestial voice from above. Sor Juana also appears to be singing from far away (as
it were, from Mexico). Those figures stand for an Ideal of female beauty (for
Dante and Kircher respectively). Theyappear
as objects of desire, of comfort, and of longing, and as such they are out of
reach.

One boundary that Andriessen dismantles in his operas
is between different vocal types: jazz singers, opera singers, early music
singers, folk singers. He has no interest in such distinctions. The voices he
envisages performing his compositions are often without vibrato, and ideally
they exhibit folk, jazz, ‘classical’ and early music qualities all at the same
time. The situation is not different in Theatre
of the World,where, for example,
the three witches, as well as He and She, are cabaret singers. Already for some
time Andriessen’s vocal muse had been the Italian singer Cristina Zavalloni,
whose extraordinary multifarious voice featured in the chamber opera Inanna(2003), the opera Anaïs Nin(2009-10), the Passeggiata in tram in America e ritorno
(1998) for solo voice and amplified solo violin, and the double concerto for
voice and violin La Passione(2002).
It also takes pride of place in La Commedia,where Cristina appears as Dante, Cristina and the ‘voice’. In Theatre
of the World Zavalloni is Sor Juana. She is given six arias that refer also
to Joana’s poetry. Musically they are also reminiscent of Spanish-Mexican folk
songs.

In terms of musical language Theatre of the World could be seen as linked to La Commedia to form a diptych. It is at least equally eclectic. It is
intriguing to see just how many references, quotations and self-quotations
Andriessen uses. The solo trombone reference appears at the beginning of Scenes
1, 8 and 9, where it is further developed in an ensemble context. The whole
character of Sor Juana is based on a kind of double reference – located
somewhere between Hadewijch and Beatrice. There are
several clear references to the Rite of
Spring by Stravinsky, most obviously at the beginning of scenes 4 and 5. In
the best tradition of De Stijl, an
alto saxophone, bass clarinet and guitar bring us a mambo-beat theme that
appears to be a quotation from ‘Tequila’ by The Champs. And suddenly above this
Latin rock theme the three witches start singing the motive from Beethoven’s
‘Ode to Joy’: Elysium from the mouths of witches who are also cabaret singers!
And the children’s song that was used as a kind of epilogue in La Commedia, is echoed in Theatre of the World Scene 3 in
instrumental form.

At the end of
his operas Andriessen often introduces some kind of Epilogue. In Rosa it was an ‘Index’ singer parodying
some of the concepts used in the opera.In La Commedia it was a
children’s choir mocking the whole situation. And in Theatre of the World the characters of the four philosophers –
Leibniz, Goethe, Descartes and Voltaire - are introduced only in the Epilogue.
They question Kircher’s scientific contribution (‘he knew nothing about
anything at all’), but finally agree that his name will be remembered. Towards
the end, the bell rings thirteen times, just as in Edgar Allan Poe’s short
story ‘The Devil in the Belfry’ (referred to in the score). The tranquility of
a remote Dutch village, whose inhabitants consider the most important things in
life to be sauerkraut and clocks, has been disturbed by the arrival of the
devil-musician. He arrives with a fiddle that is bigger than him, takes control
of the bell tower and rings 13 times on village’s bell! Order, tradition and
boredom have all been banished!

Text by Jelena Novak

The text was written for/commissioned by Dutch National Opera at the occasion of European premiere of "Theatre of the World". Dutch version of the text was published in the program booklet.